Osamu Dazai

Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, this leading postwar Japanese writer's second novel, tells the poignant and fascinating story of a young man who is caught between the breakup of the traditions of a northern Japanese aristocratic family and the impact of Western ideas. In consequence, he feels himself "disqualified from being human" (a literal translation of the Japanese title). Donald Keene, who translated this and Dazai's first novel, The Setting Sun, has said of the author's work: "His world … suggests Chekhov or possibly postwar France, … but there is a Japanese sensibility in the choice and presentation of the material. A Dazai novel is at once immediately intelligible in Western terms and quite unlike any Western book." His writing is in some ways reminiscent of Rimbaud, while he himself has often been called a forerunner of Yukio Mishima.

NO LONGER HUMAN

Isaiah

Is it not true that no two human beings understand anything whatsoever about each other, that those who consider themselves bosom friends may be utterly mistaken about their fellow and, failing to realize this sad truth throughout a lifetime, weep when they read in the newspapers about his death?

mims

hessensitive

I was aware that everybody in the apartment house was friendly to me, but it was extremely difficult for me to explain to Shigeko how much I feared them all, and how I was cursed by the unhappy peculiarity that the more I feared people the more I was liked, and the more I was liked the more I feared them- a process which eventually compelled me to run away from everybody.

 “as long as i can make them laugh, it doesn’t matter how, i’ll be alright... the one thing i must avoid is becoming offensive in their eyes: i shall be nothing, the wind, the sky.”

i was congenitally unable to refuse anything offered to me by another person, no matter how little it might suit my tastes. 

i despised him as one fit only for amusement, a man with whom i associated for that sole purpose. at times i felt ashamed of our friendship.

the manner of speech of everybody in the world- held strange, elusive complexities, intricately presented with overtones of vagueness: i have always been baffled by these precautions so strict as to be useless, and by intensely irritating little manoeuvres surrounding them. 

nullptr

People have told me, really more times than I can remember, ever since I was a small boy, how lucky I was, but I have always felt as if I were suffering in hell. It has seemed to me in fact that those who called me lucky were incomparably more fortunate than I.

Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being. 

“I seem to have heard the theory advanced that human beings live in order to cat, but I've never heard anyone say that they lived in order to make money”

I might already have been disqualified from living among human beings. This belief made me incapable of arguments or self-justification. Whenever anyone criticized me I felt certain that I had been living under the most dreadful misapprehension. I always accepted the attack in silence, though inwardly so terrified as almost to be out of my mind.

NO LONGER HUMAN quotes

Join the club